Linux Kernel Developer: Thomas Gleixner

The top 30 Linux kernel developers have contributed about 16 percent of the total changes since the start of the Git era.

Since the beginning of the Git era (that is, the 2.6.11 release in 2005), a total of 15,637 developers have contributed to the Linux kernel, according to the recent Linux Kernel Development Report, written by Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman.

Thomas Gleixner

The report states that, since the 2.6.11 release, the top 10 developers together have contributed 45,338 changes — almost 7.1 percent of the total. The top 30 developers contributed just under 16 percent of the total, as seen in the table below.

One of these top 30 developers is Thomas Gleixner, CTO at Linutronix GmbH, who serves in various kernel maintainer roles. In this article, Gleixner answers a few questions about his contributions to the Linux kernel.

Linux Foundation: What role do you play in the community and what subsystem(s) do you work on?

Thomas Gleixner: I serve various maintainer roles. The x86 architecture, the generic interrupt subsystem and the time(r) subsystem. Aside of that I’m leading the realtime preeemption project and overseeing the mainlining of it.

Linux Foundation: What’s one way you have contributed to the 4.8 to 4.13 releases?

Gleixner: Reviews and other maintainer duties, reworking CPU hotplug and the timer wheel, implementing the managed interrupt facility, helping the resource director technology support along and consolidation/cleanups all over the place.

Linux Foundation: What do you think the kernel community needs to work on in the upcoming year?

Gleixner: Aside of the technical challenges, which are hard to predict, we need more effort on code cleanup and consolidation along with more capacity for reviews.

Linux Foundation: Why do you contribute to the Linux kernel?

Gleixner: First of all, it’s fun, and I strongly believe that FOSS is the right way to go, but I freely admit that I also do it to earn my living.